Dancer Archive
Thread: SOEs Grand Experiment a failure ?
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DarkY0da
Thu Nov 04, 2004 9:58 am
#1
I don't want this thread turning into an afk/bot/entVSent flame war ok.
So the question I think is this...
Is SOEs exciting new Playstyle a failure?
It is my belief the answer to that is yes. I believe SOEs design, implementation and nurturing of this Playstyle was flawed from the start. That their premise, their thinking behind the design of this Playstyle was flawed. And that in the... what year and half now those flaws become more and more glaringly obvious.
So what can be done then?
I believe that our Playstyle and Profs need to be redesigned from the ground up. I believe that our Playstyle and Profs as we know them need to be tossed out in the trash and utterly and completely rethought in design, implementation and how they plan on nurturing the new and exciting playstyle. I believe we maybe we should abandon healing and buffing and leave it for the afk and bots. And do what we have fun doing in just entertaining and performing. Until the Devs can find the time to utterly rehaul their thinking on our Profs and Playstyle and our design and our part in SWG.
Does anyone think we can be fixed with out a complete rethinking and redesign from the ground up?
So the question I think is this...
Is SOEs exciting new Playstyle a failure?
It is my belief the answer to that is yes. I believe SOEs design, implementation and nurturing of this Playstyle was flawed from the start. That their premise, their thinking behind the design of this Playstyle was flawed. And that in the... what year and half now those flaws become more and more glaringly obvious.
So what can be done then?
I believe that our Playstyle and Profs need to be redesigned from the ground up. I believe that our Playstyle and Profs as we know them need to be tossed out in the trash and utterly and completely rethought in design, implementation and how they plan on nurturing the new and exciting playstyle. I believe we maybe we should abandon healing and buffing and leave it for the afk and bots. And do what we have fun doing in just entertaining and performing. Until the Devs can find the time to utterly rehaul their thinking on our Profs and Playstyle and our design and our part in SWG.
Does anyone think we can be fixed with out a complete rethinking and redesign from the ground up?
Message Edited by DarkY0da on 11-04-2004 09:00 AM
fett3041
Thu Nov 04, 2004 10:14 am
#3
The implementation wasn't so bad. We had a purpose. However a minor annoyance (LAMErs) was allowed to fester into the everincreasing problem of AFK and bots that we have now. Early on, SOE implemented changes to surveying to hinder doing it all AFK. I know there are workarounds for this now, but still, if they had nipped the problem in the bud, we wouldn't be choked full of weeds right now.
With the utter disrespect we get from players now (and even worse when recursive macros get nerfed),I thinkSOE's experimenthas failed. I'm not the only one who fell in love with this 'exciting and new' playstyleand pushed the cancel button over the mismanagement.
Star Wars Galaxies:The Jedi Wars (tm) has no place for us.
Dreamland
Thu Nov 04, 2004 10:24 am
#4
Well.. I have to say i do. Because i don't believe we are going to get a total redesign from the ground up. I can not forsee that amount of develoer action on this playstyle.
Here is the thing, people are going to hate having to interact with another player no matter what. People HATE having to go to doctors for buffs too, when i was a doctor I got a TON of hate thrown at me on a regular basis. The difference is they have to shut up and behave if they want to getservice from said doctor. The only difference entertainer has seen from that is that people DO NOT have to mind their manners like they do to the doctors because they can go around us.
I say once that is removed, the ability to circumvent us on a mass scale, combined with perhaps a tweaking of our heal rates and a slight reduction in BF acumulation we could become needed members of the community again.
Basicaly i am all for forced interaction and here is why, there realy is no bullet proof way i can see to eficiently encourage interaction with entertainers without creating a need to go to them. If there is one thing that people have proved in this game it's that if you don't have to do it or can find a way around it people will do so at every opertunity.
With something like jtl it is easy. It's twitch based, tweak the difficulty and you tweak the necessity of interaction. With entertainers it is not so easy, How can you get a player to come to an entertainer in such a way to fulfil the demand for the entertainer playstyle while making it so the player does not ever have to come to the entertainer if they do not want to? I am certain some of you will come up with ways. But I am equaly certain that they will not be ways that are easily implementable in a short period of time, with a minimum of developer effort.
The fact of the matter as i see it is we are very obviously not going to see this scale of intervention in the next six months.. It just is not going to happen, the combat upgrade is on the table and we are not that priority now. It may even be some time before we get to our turn for a profession revamp AFTER the CU. By that time it will be far too late, it's just about if not too late already. I believe if they implemented these BF tweaks i mentionand DO something to stop these rediculous buffbots and zombie brigades that we could enjoy this playstyle again. The reason i believe this is because I DID enjoy this playstyle alot BEFORE the buffbots and zombie brigades.
Message Edited by Dreamland on 11-04-2004 09:28 AM
DarkY0da
Thu Nov 04, 2004 10:25 am
#5
But for me my belief is that SOE designed this playstyle and profs with the thinking of girlfriends, wives and a few other people will play it. aka a graphical chatroom with a way to bring in people for them to talk to. aka a quick and easy with little to no content or additions needed to bringin someeasy money.I don't think they thought gamers, girlfriends, wives and whom ever would want to play this playstyle or that they would want more from it then it was designed for. And that they lacked the foresight or the ability to react quickly or at all to do anything about what started happening to the playstyle.
fett3041
Thu Nov 04, 2004 10:30 am
#6
You may be right. Very good point.
I think the majority of the Devs are the 'achiever' style players. The ones who want the best, the fastest. I have a feeling that they're totally at a loss on how to deal with us, asit'ssuch a foreign concept to them. Too bad they don't act on our advice, suggestions, requests, feedback, rants, etc. Too bad they continue to work with what they know and understand: the powergamer.
DarkY0da
Thu Nov 04, 2004 10:59 am
#7
I think that is sort of part of my point. I believe that SOE designed and devoloped this playstyle as a way to make some quick easy money, by bringing in Girlfriends,wives ect. with a graphical chat room with their reward being a constant stream of people coming in they could interact with, with little to no dev. time or resources needed to put into it... after all they have their "social" aspect and that's all they care about.
I don't really think anything of any great importance or use to our playstyle will be done during the CU. And our Revamp for Profs is way way off.(Plus they do have to work on another expansion for next year as well...) at min. (if it ever happens) the macro change is 6 months away. Hence my question and belief that the experiment has failed. And that we might as well just drop all our healing and buffing lines and let the afk/bots have it. We can still entertain and perform and be social and interact. We would just no longer be tied to the cantinas and we would no longer have to put up with the afk spam or the bots or being ignored. And in the time it takes to get around to our revamp maybe we can pin down the exact flaws and how to fix those/ redesign our playstyle and profs from the ground up to help fit and work with how we all want our playstyle and profs to work.
Message Edited by DarkY0da on 11-04-2004 10:07 AM
Dreamland
Thu Nov 04, 2004 11:03 am
#8
DarkY0da wrote:
I think that is sort of part of my point. I believe that SOE designed and devoloped this playstyle as a way to make some quick
Like it or not, thats what we are stuck with,I hope that our profession revamp if it ever comes proves me wrong, but this is the reason i try to focus on simple solutions for the present rather than grand solutions for the future, because i think we need some simple solutions in the meantime.
Which isn't to say the grand solutions are not needed or fun to read, they are just before their time.
Message Edited by Dreamland on 11-04-2004 10:04 AM
Reachwind
Thu Nov 04, 2004 11:06 am
#9
Honestly the only things that needs to be done are;
Setup a real payment for service method for us.
Improve our gameplay and make it interactive enough tht AFK is not possible without third party programs.
Setup a real payment for service method for us.
Improve our gameplay and make it interactive enough tht AFK is not possible without third party programs.
PoetDancer
Thu Nov 04, 2004 11:20 am
#10
Holocron (Ralph Koster) knew what he was doing. The cantinas flourished under him. But Mr. Koster is also atypical of most game designers. He realized early on that these types of games not only require technical and programming knowledge, but also knowledge of player motivations and player psychology. He himself is unorthodox in that he felt designers must approach these games not onlyin terms oftechnical science, but also human science or social science. Since ultimately these sort of games require player interactions over a long period of time, Koster discovered early on that game developers must apply principles found within economics, sociology, psychology, and anthropology in order for the game to succeed and grow. Mr. Koster was well versed in these social disciplines, and led the project in terms of these things.
We lost our only hope when we lost Mr. Koster.
What we have now are a bunch of technocrats who solve every problem as a problem in computer programmingand mathematics. But this does nothing to solve the problems of player interaction and ultimate player satisfaction. That is why these professions have suffered, and the game itself has suffered. And I'd have to say that these professions are turning out to be mirrors of their own vision: classes that work perfectly well as programmed computers--player involvement and satisfaction notwithstanding.
You cannot approach these classes as a problem that mere computer programming can solve. All you will do is create working machines, and not satisfied players. What they need to do is get a Ph.D in sociology to examine what is going wrong, and have them work together with the technocrats to create harmony in an increasingly mechanized and usatisfactory player experience. And this type of approach would benefit not only us, but many, many other players as well.
Message Edited by PoetDancer on 11-04-2004 12:26 PM
Xyrdre
Thu Nov 04, 2004 12:37 pm
#11
First off, /agree Sirii
I think that the Grand Experiment has not failed yet. I think that Test Platform I has failed. Come up with an idea, try out the implementation, and see how it works. Version I of how to make the entertainer professions work in SWG sort of worked... but then the petrie dish exploded, sending glass shards everywhere.
Really, where to go from here is a bit of a tricky question.
Some of the entertainer players want to hold on to the old way of doing things (healing/buffing, with 'forced' cantina interaction from the combat playerbase), but look to see what happened in the steps leading up to the exploding petrie dish and try to adjust the process so that nobody gets glass in their eyes next time. That's one possible way to proceed - learn from past mistakes, keep what did work, and find out what caused the breakdown, and do something different in those steps.
Other entertainer players think that at the core of the experiment, there are unstable combinations that will inevitably end in explosions. This side of things think thatthe trick to maintaining glass-free eyeballsis to go back to the drawing board and redesign, avoiding those volatile combinations, and replacing the components with more complimentary components. This too is a possible way to proceed.
Oh, and in the interest of having a total picture, there is a third readily identifiable line of thought that says that if the petrie dish is going to explode, just wear eye protection (preferably rose-colored). This camp doesn't care much if some people end up with exploding experiments, so long as their eyes are glass-free.
My personal lines of thought of late have been leading towards the second of the above scenarios - exploring total redesign options and concepts. Not because I'm convinced yet that reworking of the original experiment would be fruitless, but because I'm interested in exploring other avenues that could end up being far stronger than the original, even ifthat original conceptworked flawlessly. My hunch is that if our SWGroles as healer/buffers for the combat game were working smoothly, that would be nice... but that there are other places for a social playstyle to fit inthat would be even more satisfying and fun for the social playerbase.
Considering total reworkings of the concept of entertainer's role in SWG may end up being a total waste of time, it is true. SOE may not be open to such suggestions. Still, perhaps they might be. Nevertheless, it's my time to waste, so I'll continue to scheme along these lines. Others are working on shorter-term, more feasible now ideas, and we need that right now too. Approach the problem from multiple angles simultaneously... a reasonable plan.
Atiknin
Thu Nov 04, 2004 2:00 pm
#12
DarkY0da wrote:But for me my belief is that SOE designed this playstyle and profs with the thinking of girlfriends, wives and a few other people will play it. aka a graphical chatroom with a way to bring in people for them to talk to. aka a quick and easy with little to no content or additions needed to bring in some easy money. I don't think they thought gamers, girlfriends, wives and whom ever would want to play this playstyle or that they would want more from it then it was designed for. And that they lacked the foresight or the ability to react quickly or at all to do anything about what started happening to the playstyle.
I disagree somewhat. Raph Koster, aka Holocron aka the former Lead Designer, was steeped in MMO theory (and practice from UO). The design for entertainers was to appeal to social players, which may or may not primarily be girlfriends or wives. At launch, the game had a lack of content for just about all professions. Everything was buggy. Chefs and Smugglers had no purpose whatsoever. Bounty Hunters couldn't do their thing (of course, there weren't any jedi anyway).
Over the course of the game, all of the classes (with a couple of other unfortunate exceptions) have gotten updates. I think that may have something to do with 1) the longsuffering nature of entertainers, and 2) the fact we can be replaced by NPCs. People left classes in droves looking for the right profession, but few came back to entertainer, and there is no real demand for player entertainers. That is to say, the devs weren't required to fix the class to bring people back, because a few people created NPCs of the classes.
I'm rambling some, but my point is that they did and do plan more for ents, but there has been no strong impetus to add that functionality.
Gramon Blatt, ME/MM/MR
DarkY0da
Thu Nov 04, 2004 2:22 pm
#13
I agree Holo had good ideas and thoughts but he had other people he had to deal with. Comprimises(sp) to be made. And it had never been done before. And no one can really know what they are doing if it's never been done before.
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